Multipli-city, My Winnipeg and a pedagogy of the permanent circuit

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-139
Author(s):  
Stephen Morrow

The city is a network of boulevards, thoroughfares, highways and subway systems. The city is also a site of learning, or rather the city houses sites of learning: museums, libraries, schools, theatres and cinemas, for instance. Interestingly, these sites of learning need not be physical; indeed, regarding cinema, for example, they can be websites like Amazon, Criterion Channel, Netflix, where cinephiles can stream movies from the comfort of their home, office, car, on a phone, tablet, television. It is at the intersection of these sites – the cinema and the city – that I wish to situate this article. In particular, I explore how the filmmaker Guy Maddin with My Winnipeg (2007) finagles cinema’s essay-film genre to turn a physical space (in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) from, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, striated to smooth, points to pointillism, in which event replaces essence and multipli-city replaces singular(c)ity. The city is a machine and the machine here is D+G’s assemblage. As such, the city and the citizen/creator become one, symbio[(y)tic], and the two cannot be separated without returning the city to a simpli-city and the filmmaker to a documentarian. This film amounts to an encounter that causes thinking (in Deleuzian terms) and thus learning and thus a way forward for thinking through a pedagogy of the permanent circuit.

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Apgar

As destination of choice for many short-term study abroad programs, Berlin offers students of German language, culture and history a number of sites richly layered with significance. The complexities of these sites and the competing narratives that surround them are difficult for students to grasp in a condensed period of time. Using approaches from the spatial humanities, this article offers a case study for enhancing student learning through the creation of digital maps and itineraries in a campus-based course for subsequent use during a three-week program in Berlin. In particular, the concept of deep mapping is discussed as a means of augmenting understanding of the city and its history from a narrative across time to a narrative across the physical space of the city. As itineraries, these course-based projects were replicated on site. In moving from the digital environment to the urban landscape, this article concludes by noting meanings uncovered and narratives formed as we moved through the physical space of the city.


Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.


Author(s):  
Jenna Ward ◽  
Allan Watson

The music industry is characterized by stereotypical images of excess, pleasure, intensity, and play that have given rise to folklore of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” Through a qualitative study of sound engineers this chapter explores two main questions: To what extent is the lived reality of working in studio contexts with creative artists reflected in the stereotypical representations of “rock ’n’ roll”? To what extent is the “rock ’n’ roll vibe” an organic, voluntary state of creativity or facilitated “emotional FX” elicited by studio staff to enhance particular musical performances? The chapter demonstrates ways in which engineers and producers manage their emotions to influence and support performances from artists. These emotional labor performances aim to recast the technological, and often stark, physical space of the recording studio as a site of autonomy and play, turning work spaces into sites of pleasure and excess in sometimes uncomfortable working conditions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Bob Brown

A new urban paradigm, the global city, emerged in the late 20th Century finding acceptance in discussions of urban development. Tied into a global network of exchange, it exists principally as a place of financial speculation and transaction. It is marked by a parallel economy of culture, which underpins a re-conceptualisation and spatial re-formation of the city. Despite its widespread currency, criticisms have challenged its economic sustainability. Further questions have contested its tendency to impose a singular, homogenized space prioritizing consumption while marginalising other concerns. Post-independence Riga's recent experience provides a platform from which to critique the global city paradigm, which the city embraced as it sought to embed itself in the West not only politically but culturally and economically as well. In opposition to this model's intrinsic singular emphasis and exclusionary tendencies, this text will explore the concept of palimpsest; this proposition understands the city as a multiplicity of layers, within which convergences and divergences offer a site from which to generate synergies. This will be framed in reference to recent discourse on the sustainable city and development practice. Recent design-led inquiry situated in the context of Riga will then provide a lens on palimpsest as an alternative form of praxis.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Marius Grřnning

Fjord City is the slogan for the development of the Oslo waterfront. What appears as a unified design is in reality a mosaic of interventions implemented gradually under different conditions. The 1980s were characterised by a cultural orientation to give priority to the urban centre in a climate of political polarisation, economic liberalism and institutional transformation. In the 1990's the state resumed an active role, in conditions offinancial crisis, launching new policies and new regulatory mechanisms. Norway re-established institutional stability in 2000 and Fjord City reflects the form of government that replaced the traditional model of social democratic planning. The organisation of decision-making for the development of the city are to be seen on this ground of interaction between physical space and the institutional sphere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-566
Author(s):  
Jessica Wright

In late antique theological texts, metaphors of the brain were useful tools for talking about forms of governance: cosmic, political, and domestic; failed and successful; interior discipline and social control. These metaphors were grounded in a common philosophical analogy between the body and the city, and were also supported by the ancient medical concept of the brain as the source of the sensory and motor nerves. Often the brain was imagined as a monarch or civic official, governing the body from the head as from an acropolis or royal house. This article examines two unconventional metaphors of the brain in the work of the fifth-century Greco-Syrian bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus—the brain as a treasure within the acropolis, and the brain as a node in an urban aqueduct—both of which adapt the structural metaphor of governance to reflect the changing political and economic circumstances of imperial Christianity. Drawing upon medical theories of the brain, Theodoret expands upon the conventional governance metaphor of brain function to encompass the economic and the spiritual responsibilities of the bishop-administrator. Just as architectural structures (acropolis, aqueduct) contain and distribute valuable resources (treasure, water) within the city, so the brain accumulates and redistributes nourishing substances (marrow, blood, pneuma) within the body; and just as the brain functions as a site for the transformation of material resources (body) into spiritual goods (mind), so the bishop stands as a point of mediation between earthly wealth and the treasures of heaven.


Ethnography ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Rosen

This article explores themes of chance and contingency in relation to field research I carried out in a network of outdoor newspaper libraries in Pune, India. Appearing amid the city’s transformation into a major regional hub linking western Maharashtra into the global economy, the vernacular institution of the footpath library emerges as a lens for bringing a range of issues related to social change in urban India into clearer focus. I show that the street library is not just a quiet place to sit and read but a site of social visibility and cultural assertion for Marathi-speaking migrants in the city.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gholam Reza Mirie ◽  
Mohsen Sadeghi

The purpose of the present study was to determine the performance of responsible organizations in urban affairs administration as an important factor in the development of the city of Pars Abad. The statistical population of this research includes inhabitants of Parasabad city and managers and experts of urban affairs in 1396. The method of this study is descriptive-practical study. For data collection, library and field method is used for urban data and questionnaire. These data are analyzed using SPSS software and also used to test the hypothesis of T-test. The results of this study show that the performance of the responsible unit in the affairs of the city has a significant relationship with the management and organization of the physical-space development process, equipping the service space and organizing facilities and facilities in the city of Parsabad. While the responsibility of the responsible authority in affairs of the city is not significantly related to the development of the employment and business environment and the establishment of effective communication channels with citizens and the development of popular participation


Author(s):  
Nieves De Mingo Izquierdo

What happens when a woman, housewife and mother, decides to take to her room and stay in bed for a whole year? This scarcely plausible proposition opens the last published work by the late British author Sue Townsend. This paper aims to explain the main coordinates of the narrative by using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia; an effective, theoretical tool when applied to the analysis of a contained, physical space which is eventually turned into a site of contestation by means of the protagonist’s self-imposed confinement. This implies further questioning on the degree of agency she displays within her environment and, in addition, raises doubts about whether the novel responds to a feminist stance on the part of the author or to a literary depiction of her unavoidable withdrawal from the outside world due to her personal circumstances.


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